Overview

Searching in E-Rkive is extremely fast! You can search through many gigabytes of emails in just a few seconds. The first search you do (each time you open the application or Outlook) will always be slower that subsequent searches as the archives need to be optimised for searching on the first.

We need your help!

Intentionally, E-Rkive has been released with only simple searching. This in itself is very powerful but requires an advanced knowledge of the different types of statements you can type to refine your searching. We want to start immediately on building an advanced searching tool so we would like to hear from you about the types of searches you want to do regularly.

Search Options

Searching can be done from either the application or from a menu option within Outlook. The search bar is designed to cater for simple searches but it can be refined to perform more complex searching.

The searching functionality in E-Rkive is very similar to the way major internet search engines perform their searching (like google).

The search bar provides options you can pre-select before searching to restrict the number of records returned:

• Source: You can opt to search across All Archives down to only the currently selected folder (This Folder).
• Fields: You can opt to search for a term in a specific field or all fields. Note that both names and email addresses will be searched when you select From, To, CC or BCC.

In addition to the commands below we will be adding our own custom commands. Custom commands are always uppercase and are preceded by 2 dashes. We only have one command available which is --DELETED. This command returns a list of all the deleted messages in the selected Source.

Single word searches

Words can be searched for as whole words or partial words. Partial words can only be searched for where the beginning of a word is provided (you cannot search for partial words where the search term is in the middle or at the end of a word). For example the term data* would return results containing the word data as well as database and datastore.

Phrase searches

Enclosing a phrase in double quotes (") will look for the exact text as specified between the quotes. Searching for "cat sat on" would return results containing the text the cat sat on the mat. Searching for "cat on mat" would not return this result.

Words NEAR each other

YOu can search for 2 or more words that are within proximity (the default is 10) of each other.

• The term cat NEAR mat would return results where the text the cat sat on the mat was found.
• The search term cat NEAR/3 mat would also find this term but cat NEAR/2 mat would not.

NEAR searches are not restricted to only 2 words. You could also search for cat NEAR/2 on NEAR/2 mat. which would find the cat sat on the mat because cat is within 2 words of on and on is within 2 words of mat.

AND, OR and NOT searches

Searches can be further refine by using AND, OR and NOT commands between words or phrases. These commands must be specified in UPPER CASE or they will be effective.

• cat AND mat will return results where both words exist in the text
• cat OR mat will return results where either word exist in text
• cat NOT mat will return results where cat is found but only when mat is not found in text

NOTE: The AND command is inferred which means if you search for cat mat it is the same and typing cat AND mat.

Searching with parenthesis

To further refine searches to can specify which part of a search term is processed first. The precedence of commands are as follows:

• NOT
• AND
• OR

This means that if NOT and AND are found in a search term, the NOT statement will be processed first then the AND command will be applied to the results of the NOT command. Using parenthesis you can process the search term so that AND is processed first then the NOT command is applied to the results of the AND command. For example:

• cat AND mat NOT sat - gets a list that does not contain the word sat then returns results from this list where both cat and mat are found.
• (cat AND mat) NOT sat - get a list where cat and mat are found then returns results from this list where sat is not found.

Searching for multiple words in different fields

The search options only allow searching for search terms in a specific field or all fields. If you want to search for specific terms in specific fields you can do this too.

For example if you want to search for a word in a specific field, just preceed the word with the name of the field and a colon (no spaces). For example, if I want to search for the word cat in the body of the message but only where the message was sent from bob I could use the following search....

First of all, this will only work if you select All fields from the fields list. Then enter from:bob body:cat. The results returned will be where bob was found in the from field AND the word cat was found in the body field.

NOTE: search words are not case sensitive but command words like NEAR are. Searching for 'cat near mat' would look for text that contained all 3 words and would not apply the NEAR command.